Monday, November 28, 2011

Bright Future for Scandinavian Digital Publishing

Approximately 90 Scandinavian publishing executives gathered a couple weeks ago in Copenhagen, Denmark at the historic Carlsberg brewery for the annual invitation-only Scandinavian Publishing Executive Meeting. The conference was organized by Schilling, a strategic consultancy for Scandinavian publishers.

The conference took a decidedly international theme by importing speakers from Spain, the U.K. and United States, including yours truly representing Smashwords, and Nyree Belleville, a best-selling Smashwords author who writes under the pen names Bella Andre and Lucy Kevin.

Scandinavia is representative of the vast majority of global ebook markets where ebooks still represent less than one percent of overall trade book sales. Like the markets in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia which have experienced a rapid transition to ebooks over the last two and three years, the building blocks are now falling into place for Scandinavia to experience similar exponential growth as readers transition from paper reading to screen reading.

Personal highlights of the conference:

Apple's Nordic region manager talked about the iPad's potential to unleash the creativity of authors and publishers

Pete Downton, a former VP at Warner Music, urged book publishers not to repeat the errors of music publishers (who dealt with change by raising prices and suing customers).

Nyree Belleville talked about how she'll earn over $1 million this year selling indie ebooks, and why she's unlikely to go back to traditional publishing

Presentations from four interesting publishing startups - 24Symbols, Jellybooks, Smashwords and Valobox - exploring new business models to connect readers with books

An overarching theme of unprecedented opportunity for the world's authors and publishers to leverage the power of global distribution to reach new markets with ebooks that were previously unreachable via print.